The Beginning of Me

Hey everyone, I am Chayntnear Abulagambanay, I am born of East Africa family, but I grow up in U.S.A. I live now in Zanzibar Island and Tanzania, and I love it. Most of the future articles will be of discussion about Tanzania, but it took me a while to build up my fortune to be able to afford living here as it is higher expensive more than most places in Africa. Africa is a very poor continent as a whole, but the luxurious place to live like me in Zanzibar island take some money, usually coming with loads and loads of hardest work, more than most.

So like I said, I was born in East Africa, Somalia to be exact. Not many of us in Somalia make it out to have a better life. To be honest, most of my childhood friends did not either. They either are doing illegal pirating, which is primarily stealing from others for themselves, dead, or they moved away from their home and I have lost all of my contact with them.

Living in Somalia is a very hectic country. The citizens are consistently at war with each other, with the government, and with other countries, or types of people.

Me, myself, I did actually have to participate in some pirating activity. I know my identity is safe now, but I never actually hurt anyone. While my friends, or so I thought, would be hoping onto ships with weapons, threatening them to take all of the cargo and load it onto our ship, or we would steal their ship, I would be the man in charge of driving and guiding the boat. I felt I had the easiest job because I would not be risking be in a weapons battle, but there was much pressure on me by my mates to succeed in my traveling and I had to be very precise with my movements. Luckily, my hands are very steady and I was an excellent boat driver. When I drive the boat, nothing goes wrong.

But, after many days of these heists that we would pull at least once a month, I started to realize and tell myself that there was no way that I could live this life forever. It was then, that I used my boat skills to sneak into a nearby harbor where I boarded a ship that I knew was headed for the America’s, just didn’t know exactly which one.

Luckily, my boat arrived in America, and, as a normal Somalian, a few days of travel with no food left me starving. I was in southern Texas, and after seeing many white folk and Mexican folk, I didn’t think would be able to sneak around as easily here. I ended up finding work with a nice Texan (there are nice ones, this guy was definitely one of them) who paid me to work on his landscaping, and I was getting paid nearly minimum wage as an illegal immigrant! I considered myself very lucky and fortunate to be in this situation.